


Gratitude of the Crane

by ZombieJesus



Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Intimacy, Japanese Fairy tale, Light sees something from his cell window, M/M, One Shot, Second Chances, Secrets, Soft Magic, Wounded things, Yotsuba Arc, lawlight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-08 18:12:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14699571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZombieJesus/pseuds/ZombieJesus
Summary: During confinement, Light sees something remarkable from his cell window, and asks Watari for help to resolve the mystery. He asks L about it after his release and gets answers, just not the ones he thought he would.





	Gratitude of the Crane

It was late into the summer and nearly autumn when it appeared across the street from Kira HQ one morning. Light had a single window in his cell, L had allowed him that much, and there was little else to do with his time but gaze out of it to the thin slice of Tokyo below. He knew every scrawny tree that struggled to grow down there between the iron giants, came to understand the schedules of some of the pedestrians as they headed to and from work. He gave them names in his mind, concocted stories for their secret lives. The businessman who looked tired because he was a pool shark by night, perfecting trick shots and hustling unsuspecting tourists. The hostess who wrote beautiful poetry she would never publish because her best friend had once laughed at it. The old woman who remembered the war times, barely, and tried to tell her children. They didn't want to hear it.

 

So when the crane flapped awkwardly down from the sky and settled like an unsteady angel in the largest cherry tree, he noticed. It was an odd place for a crane to be, in the middle of the city like this, and Light wondered if maybe it had gotten lost or blown off its migration by a storm. _These cranes are rare, endangered. What's it doing here?_ He watched it all day as the people passed below the tree unawares; being so high above, he had a direct line of sight, but the clockwork world just kept ticking and didn't look up. By the late afternoon, Light had watched it long enough to know it was somehow wounded. The crane's feathers were rumpled, its slender neck bowed low, and one of its wings jutted out in an angle that was wrong. _It's hurt._ Light sighed in frustration, watching no one notice it, no one help it. The sun was slipping behind the skyscrapers now, and the crane's snowy feathers began to turn pink with the last rays of the sun. But it would move occasionally, it was still alive.

 

Light tore his eyes from the window when the door to his cell opened and Watari pushed the dinner cart inside. Usually he'd just wheel it in and Light would be left to eat the food as best he could, given his hands were restrained. But this time Light stopped him, his voice croaking slightly from disuse. "Wait...please."

 

Watari didn't turn to face him, didn't speak. But he paused in the doorway nonetheless, listening.

 

Light knew the older man didn't like to look at him, he wasn't sure why. He started off hesitantly, "There's...a bird, across the street. A crane. I think it's hurt."  _I must sound like a fool, caring about a bird given the situation I'm in. But what else do I have to care about?_ "Would you do me a favor and...check on it?"

 

Watari did turn around then, staring him full in the face. The lines around his mouth deepened, but his expression was not unkind, just surprised. "A crane, sir?"

 

Light inclined his head, motioning Watari to the window then gazing across the street. "Look. In the tree across the street."

 

Watari gave him a distrustful look, but shut the cell door and came to look out the window. Light watched his face closely as his eyes widened, seeing the pink-tinged crane at last. Quietly, "How unusual." They watched it huddle itself down in the treetop as the light continued to fade.

 

Light turned to him, "So you'll help it?" He held up his handcuffed hands and tried to smile. "I seem to be unable to." 

 

Watari's eyes snapped to him as if coming out of a daydream, and he straightened up and moved back to the door. "I can't make any promises. Ryuzaki doesn't wish for me to be seen outside."

 

"But--" Light started to protest but Watari was already through the door, the bolt turning in the lock. Light turned back to the window, raising his hands to hold the bars and sighing as the handcuff chain clinked against them. A few drops of late summer rain were starting to fall, Light could see their golden shadows in the illumination below. _It won't survive in the rain, hurt and alone. I suppose wild things are meant to die like this._ But after some minutes of watching he noticed a white shirt in the light of the street lamps below, slouching across the street. He gripped the bars tighter, recognizing that form, knowing it.  _L went himself?_

 

The figure stopped beneath the tree, and then Light didn't see them anymore until a gloved hand reached up and grasped the crane, taking it back down the tree. Light smiled as it flapped in Ryuzaki's hands as bird and man made their way back to the tower. A crane was auspicious. You should't let it die.

 

\-----

 

As the days slid into weeks, months, he forgot about the crane in the delirium of sameness. White walls didn't recall white feathers as they once had, instead wiping him clean as they were, spotless, void. Watari came and went, and didn't speak. Light's questions went unanswered and eventually, unasked.

 

It wasn't until their first night handcuffed together that Light remembered it. He laid on his side of their bed, concentrating hard on keeping his temper under control and not strangling the person who'd goaded his own father to show him the muzzle of a gun.  _Do you know what you've done to me? Do you think I'll ever be the same?_ So many angry questions and accusations came to his mind, but instead of voicing them he started to tremble as he remembered it, the crane. Blown into the city, wounded and alone. Sitting in a single place to wait out its death or its salvation, for someone to come. Light focused on the ceiling and whispered, "What happened to it?"

 

L had his back to him, curled on top of the covers versus beneath them, and still fully clothed in his jeans and white shirt. But he wasn't asleep. "To what, Light-kun?"

 

"The crane. The one I told Watari about." Light turned on his side, speaking to the back of L's head. "I saw you go and get it from the tree that night."

 

L turned over slowly to face Light, a curious look in his eyes. "You saw that..."

 

Light nodded, watching those grey eyes open wider. "From my cell window. I could tell it was hurt." Light bit his lip, wondering why it now meant so much for him to know. If he wanted to know. Whispered, "Did it die?"

 

L stared at him, expressionless, "It's wing was badly broken, couldn't fly--" L stopped talking as he saw tears falling from Light's eyes. "What's wrong?" A finger went to his mouth, stayed there.

 

 _It's dead._ Light laughed softly as his vision blurred. It was stupid, so stupid that this of all things had finally broken him tonight after the shit he'd already been through.  _I never wanted him to see me cry, not him, not L._ "Nothing." _It wanted help._ He wiped his face angrily on the pillow and turned away, clutching the bed sheets tight in his hand. "Goodnight."  _Why couldn't you save it?_ Light laid there in the darkness a while, his eyes closed and ready, so ready for sleep to descend so this night could be over. But he knew he'd just wake up tomorrow and nothing would have changed.  _I'll still be sitting in that tree, waiting for the rain to come._ He heard L scoot forward, felt his warmth closer, and froze. 

 

"Light-kun." L wrapped an arm over him, settling against his back, his forehead on Light's shoulder. "I didn't kill it."

 

"But it died."  _It's just a bird._

 

"Yes." 

 

Light sighed deeply, and he thought now he should throw L's arm off him, take up his own armor instead and cocoon in it. There was no comfort to be had from this person.  _You put me in that tree. Broke my wing, my spirit._ But he didn't. _You were the rain._ Instead he turned to face L, eyes red and puffy and tired. "Did you try to help it at least?"

 

"Some things are too far gone to help." L's brow furrowed, and he touched a wet spot on Light's face. "But yes, I tried." The dim moonlight from the window cast them both in monochrome, and L had the feeling of being in an old photograph, a snapshot in time he'd want to remember. "Why does Light-kun care so much?"

 

Light didn't flinch as L touched his face again, dotting away tears like the points of constellations. "It's silly I know, but...I always thought cranes were magic." Light smiled lamely, not meeting L's eyes. "Probably because of this story I was told as a kid."

 

L didn't grow up in Japan, he didn't know the story Light was referring to. "What is it?"

 

Light was finally relaxing a little, it was soothing to feel a warm body next to him after months of isolation.  _Even you._ "A man is wandering in a forest and finds a crane caught in a trap. He releases it, and that night is visited by a young woman who asks to be taken in, and he agrees to let her in."

 

"Well, that seems rather incautious of them both."

 

Light rolled his eyes, but a smile peeked through. "It's a story, Ryuzaki, come on."

 

L smiled back at him, "Yes, go on then."

 

"He lets her stay and they fall in love, but he's very poor. So the woman says she can weave a beautiful cloth that can be sold for a high price. On one condition--he can never look inside the room she's weaving in."

 

L frowned, "That sounds rather suspicious."

 

Light nodded, "Yeah, he got suspicious too, and despite her warnings, he finally looked in the room. But he really shouldn't have."

 

"What did he see?"

 

"The woman was actually the crane he set free from the trap, and she was weaving the cloth from her own feathers. Plucking them out and threading them into something beautiful, magical." 

 

L scooted even closer, "Quite a sacrifice for the crane."

 

"Yes, she didn't have many feathers left anymore, she'd used so many to help him. And as soon as the man saw her, she told him that she couldn't stay with him any longer, now that he knew her secret, who she really was." Light closed his eyes as he felt long fingers trace up and down his back soothingly. "She left and joined the other cranes, even though she wanted to stay with him, and died the only crane that had felt love, remorse for a human." Light opened his eyes and saw that L looked thoughtful now, even sad, and he almost felt sorry for telling him the fairy tale.

 

"It is kind of a sad story, isn't it? He shouldn't have looked." L swallowed, his lips parting.

 

"I don't think he could help it." Light brushed some long bangs from L's eyes, envisioning his crane as the one from the story, flown from her love and now unique among all birds. "He didn't know what the knowledge would cost him." _Some knowledge has a price._

 

"Maybe he knew she was the crane all along. Maybe he knew they couldn't be together, and looked on purpose to set her free?" L's fingers went up to touch Light's in his hair, pushed into them and held fast. 

 

Light felt his heart race with how L was looking up at him now, and a flood of confusing feelings flowed through him.  _You've been nothing but smug, taunting, cold. Who are you now?_ "It was his own trap that caught her, hurt her. If he didn't want her after that, why set the trap at all?"

 

"He probably set a thousand traps after she flew away, trying to catch her again. So he could free her again. Have another chance." L brought Light's hand to his lips, kissing it softly. "I'm sure he missed her."

 

Light watched L trailing kisses over his palm, down his wrist, but didn't stop him. "I doubt she'd be as grateful the second time."  _It ruined her._

 

L stopped and gazed up at him. Softly, "So maybe the trick is not to look." _Not at what we shouldn’t._ He draped a leg over Light's, as close as he could possibly be. _I won’t kill the magic, I’ll save you._ "Even when you know of the illusion, don't look." And as his lips met Light's, he closed his eyes tight. Didn't look.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Light tells L this story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuru_no_Ongaeshi


End file.
